Losing you Religion as a Way through a Crisis of Faith
As a writer on stages of personal and spiritual development I feel for those people who are pulled into a crisis of faith. I have been through my own crisis of faith during my own spiritual journey. Now I am comfortable simply sitting before a window of morning light “losing my religion.” I feel fine about this. The religion I has was a comfort at the time but it required me to be who I was not. All the better then that I am losing it. I have a deep love for religious teachings. I love the words from the Bible, The Upanishads, The Bhagavad-Gita, the Dhammapada and many other beautiful books of love. All these words are useful. They are like the support wheels on a child’s bike. They help. They give confidence. They give re-assurance. They call. They lift the heart. They help us embrace the invisible.
When someone finds that they are losing their religion they generally tend to be experiencing a crisis of faith. For many sincere fans of the customs of religion this crisis of faith is sometimes, and for the most part is, very painful. It is for that reason that I write about the various and diverse stages of personal and personal development. The crises of faith that many experience is a recognized stage of faith development. It happens to be a terrifying side of such religion development. Such crisis of faith is not something that anyone of us would consciously invite.
Only to “be truly religious” you have to let go of all words. You have to lose “your religion” so that you become “truly religious.” You have to take the risk that without the support of the words of your scripture that you will find what is beyond the words. Letting go into the heart with trust and faith you will find you are given support beyond belief. Rather than be a “religious person” you become a faith filled being of Light. You drop belief in order to “be life.” Many of us who profess faith fear loosing it. We fear that one day “our faith” will no longer be there. This is because it is “our faith.” We are the ones who cling to it for “dear life.” Ask us to give up the support of the wheels on each side of our life and we fear we will fall into and abyss. We might even end up in hell.
When you let go into real faith and trust you fall into balance. You can flow with life. It is already holding you up. You cannot fall out of life no matter how hard you try. With “your faith” you are like a fish in the ocean looking for water. You hold on to the extent that you miss. Many of us who are “religious people” do our religion. We do the practice. We engage with the ritual. We belong to a group. The more people we have in our group the more it seems that the truth of what we “believe in” is manifested. Assuredness in “our faith” becomes a numbers game.
Losing “your religion” and going through a crisis of faith is a requirement of the true seeker.This is the one who wishes to know the full experience of love and life eternal. Your religion will eventually have to go. Everything has to go. In the end the very idea of God has to go. In this letting go of all that you think you are “love is.” The Beloved is seen and you return to your original face. You and the dance of life are one. Does the mean we do away with all the Churches, Temples, Mosques and other places of worship. These places are not the issue. It is the attachment to such places and their teachings that are the issue. The teachings are needed. They help take you beyond. Only rather than liberate they themselves often become the prison. We get attached to our “religious” label and then anything can be and is justified in the “name of God.” Losing your religion is a great cause for celebration.
You become an individual. For one moment you are free. You only need one moment. The experience of the Divine opens up to the unidentified heart. The surrendered heart is waiting in the moment to be fulfilled. It is filled with the experience of love eternal. There is only the experience and nothing but the experience. There is no ego getting in the way to step between you and the dance. For one moment you are life and not someone having a life experience. For one moment you relax into being life. You are not Tony Cuckson (to use myself as an example) having an experience of life. You are life itself. You are life experiencing the joy of living. Life is only moment-to-moment and you know that life is love. There is no problem. Tony Cuckson is the problem. Our identification with ego is the problem. To lose your religion you need strong ego boundaries. You need to be able to stand-alone. You need to be able to be comfortable in your physical, emotional, mental and spiritual bodies. You need integrity. You need to be one body. You flow toward discovery that you are integral. Then at one time you are integral. You are certain. Certainty comes. This is not something that is cerebral. It is total. It is whole. It makes you whole and holy. This is the religious experience.
The religious experience is not dogma. It is not fixed for eternity. It is forever in flow. Dogma is the stagnant pool that too many drink from and espouse as being “the water of life.” They live far from the river and even further from the ocean. In the religious experience one becomes knowing. One goes beyond the issue of believing in God. What to believe when you know. Belief is a hindrance. It holds you back. Belief, as I understand it, is an instruction to “be life.” This is the key to the door of the prison of illusion. Somehow this word “belief” has been devalued. It has come to be understood as an attitude of mind. It has become something that one chooses rather than one becomes. Yet we use the words “beyond belief” to describe the most extra ordinary experience. This is the “religious experience.” This experience as we know has, and always will be, “beyond belief.” The experience of the Beloved is “beyond belief.”
Beyond belief you are a life of being. The Beloved comes and dances. You and the dance are forever one. What if you stop believing? What will happen to you? If you are lucky you will begin to disappear. You will feel empty. The wheels supporting “your life” have been removed. Do not confuse “belief” with “non-belief.” Each is the other side of the coin. Each is a choice. ” With belief” and “non-belief” there is still the ego. There is still the tension of the ego. The one who knows needs no belief. The one who knows goes beyond the limitation of ego. There is only the knowing. There is the delight of knowing “one is.”
So here I am writing in my corner and “losing my religion.” These “religious teaching” have been companions and a support along the way. These teachings have been a vehicle for “going beyond.” They have been a vehicle to carry “little me” beyond belief. This is so that “little me” disappears into the knowing of love. This is not such a loss. For many, religion has become a burden. They carry this burden on their backs much of their lives. I have, as a child, been taught by many who have carried such a burden. I have seen the burden of religion carried by many people in the country of Northern Ireland. This is the country into which I was born. This is a county were religion rather than the religious experience has and still reigns. This is no different to most countries.
Castle on a Riverbank – Harold Hitchcock
Religion for many has become and issue of comfort from the fear of death. It is an issue of security. Many belong to a religious group “just in case.” For some this is because of feelings of deep unworthiness and self-doubt. Rather than be lifted up they carry the additional weight of a religious book. This often becomes a prison rather than the key to liberation. “Religion” as a word means, “to bind. The word “religious” means “reverence.” One keeps you tied and the other gives freedom. You are either a “religious person” or you are a “being of love.” One can be a satisfactory ego identity and the other is the experience of peace beyond understanding. Lose your religion. Become the experience of reverence and surrender. Christ was not a Christian. Buddha was not a Buddhist. Mohammad was not a Muslim. They were all living experiences of Universal love manifesting within time, space and culture. Each is the knower of eternity. Theirs is the living teachings beyond belief.
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Loss of Faith–The Beginning of an Awakening
Loss of faith, whether in a religious, political or relationship context, is a great source of suffering for many people. I write about stages of personal and spiritual development in order that such suffering created by such loss of faith be minimised or alleviated. Awareness of the various stages of personal, spiritual and faith development allow people to more easily transit from one stage of spiritual development to another. Personally speaking, it helps tremendously to know that loss of faith is a natural growth process and is the invitation to the beginning of true awakening.
I recently watched a video that showed the sun rising over a mountain at dawn. The voice over on the video spoke about a person they knew who was a member of a Christian church. They had confided that they felt that they were experiencing a los of faith. The teaching they once held so dear had become dry and had begun to loose all meaning. The words that had once given them such comfort had become simply words on a page.
The Mystery of Faith – Simeon Solomon
For many secular people such an experience as a loss of faith does not resonate. However, if you have ever lost faith in a relationship that was of immense importance to you then you might, even if you do not consider yourself religious, get an idea about what loss of faith can mean for the individual who loves what it is such faith gives to them. There is experienced a real sense of distress when the person begins to experience loss of faith in a system of belief that them gives their lives a connection to something beyond. This also allows the individual to belong to a community. I have personally witnessed this loss of faith lead to the loss of long term friendships, lost marriages, lost community and a loss of the sense of who the individual was and is.
This is why it helps, at least in theory, to know the transitions involved in various stages of faith development and their relationship to personal and spiritual development. It helps to know what happens along the way in regard to loss of faith. Like a lot of experiences in life, a crisis of faith, can also lead to an opportunity for deepening our connection to what this writer refers to as the faith process. Faith,as written about here, need not be simply a faith in a belief system of a designated religion. It could be faith in one’s connection to a political ideal or faith in ones core value system. There are many maps that outline the stages of the spiritual journey which has as a key aspect the journey into the faith that can and does move mountains. In this writer’s examination of these stages there is a major transition that involves the loss of faith. This is the stage where one moves from the dependence on outer forms to the direct awareness of the inner teachings at the heat of all religions and timeless wisdom traditions.
The key transition on the spiritual journey and the journey of faith is the transition from the outer focus to the inner focus. In various religious traditions this is recognised as a from of initiation. It is the initiation from the exoteric way to the esoteric way. This is the transition of that stage of the spiritual journey from the belief of the many into what is beyond belief and what few of us choose to move into. This is a frightening process for many sincere spiritual seekers. They are pulled each and every way. They know that what they once had isn’t working any more but they don’t know where they are going and they feel lost. they feel that they are losing faith and it is for some their only anchor in a stormy sea of lost meaning.
This is where true soul friendship helps. This is where having a true Anam cara really helps. they will tell you with confidence that while you are loosing faith you are also beginning the process of awakening. What where once words that might have been comforting now become the invitation beyond the words. This is the opening up of awareness to other aspects of your being. What was once the structure of a system of belief now becomes the invitation to the direct experience beyond belief.
The Anam cara knows this process. They have gone through that period of not knowing and come out on a plateau higher up the mountainside. they are a seer who is able to invite you into a vision beyond your crisis of faith. The loss of faith can be a new day dawning. It is in fact a form of awakening and a transiting between faith as being outer directed to a faith that is moved from within. This is a deep personal journey beyond belief into the direct experience of stillness that knows how to be still and know I AM God.
Loss of faith is part of the process of spiritual development and faith development. The problem is, and it is a real problem if you happen to be a member of a community of believers. This includes those who happen to be believer’s in political or social ideal. Within any group there is what is called the group dynamic. Human beings are social animals. We like, and we need to belong and from a psychological and health point of whew it is best if we have some sense of true belonging. When we are at one stage of spiritual development we give our focus to being good members of our church group, our political group or to whatever group gives us this sense of belonging and connectedness.
This gives our lives focus, meaning and a sense of belonging. This gives many people a great deal of comfort. This belonging to the group, however, is inherent on your accepting the beliefs of the group and adhering to the group ethos and practices. Then one day, or more often, over a period of time one begins to question the beliefs of the group and this is very often an internal process that brings a sense of being deeply divided and torn between what is happening and staying within the group and the comfort and security of the group dynamic.
Most groups do not want you questioning their core beliefs. They would prefer that you leave the flock. You have become a disbeliever and what you are experiencing might be infectious. The group try to reassure you that this phase will pass and that whet you need to do is pray more, meditate more, go on one more retreat and basically do more of what you used to do. This will work for a while but the call of the inner is deeper, is more energetic and is more powerful. What is beyond belief is more dynamic than belief in an outer set of words. Many simply repress this experience which leads to loss of soul, loss of meaning and often leading to depression. The individual stays within the group and goes through the motions of believing but the process of transition has begun. The individual can resist this spiritual development and process of faith development but the call of the inner has started and it will continue despite the resistance.
Helping with Loss of Faith
What is need here is not judgement but reassurance. The person who is making this transition experiences loss of faith and feels deeply divided. This individual needs to be assured that this crisis of faith is a deepening of the faith process. In matters of faith, which is one’s relationship to the knowing within and the intuitive within begins when one starts to become ones own authority. This threatens the dynamic of established hierarchies where believers who wish to be part of the group must adopt the rules and practices of the group.
Many spiritually devote people suffer terribly through this stage of faith development. They are in many ways abandoned even if they continue to attend at their centre of worship or their community centre. When they ask for spiritual direction, it tends to be more of the same because the spiritual director wants them to continue in the faith as it is promoted at the level of understanding which the person is in the process of working to transcend.
Too many are left to struggle on their own. They can’t really go to a counsellor because usually a counsellor doesn’t know anything about the mapped stages of spiritual development. They may know about the journey of personal development but not the journey of the stages beyond personal development that includes the development of faith. There seem nowhere to turn. One feels between a rock and a hard place.
The Awakening – Thomas Cooper Gotch
What is needed is a soul friend. This is one who knows the journey and befriends the soul. The soul is that dynamic that is calling to the person in the crisis of faith to move beyond and move higher into know rather than believing. The soul friend has been there and transitioned this stage of loss of faith. Their allegiance is not to any belief system but to the soul of the individual and the unique way that the journey of faith moves through them. They do not call the person back into the outer trappings of a belief system but into the depth of not knowing and the trusting in the eternal mystery that can be the knowing of who you are. The sadness is that this process is know and the suffering can be alleviated but the reality is that we resist all forms of change. The spiritual development and the development of faith is no different.
Loss of faith is a very specific stage of spiritual growth. You don’t have to be a card carrying member of a religious group. You can be a new ager who works on their own and might have belief in the power of crystals. It matters not. It does help to be aware that loss of faith, although difficult, is a kind of giving birth. It is harder because it is an invisible process and what is beyond the pain of this birthing is unknown. Neither do you quite know how long such a period of birthing into the unknown will last.
Having said that, however, this is only a stage. There are those who know the territory. There are those who have written guide maps through this territory. There are those who are able to guide you through this transition of loss of faith. They are not intent on keeping you in the stage you are leaving nor in pulling you into the sate beyond. They know how hard such this transition is. What helps tremendously, is that they know what it is you are going through and have the skill of a midwife who birth stages of spiritual development and brings life into the world that is the life referred to when the Mater Jesus said.
I come to bring you life and I come to bring it more abundantly.
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